Toledo schools defend policy on data

Friday

Aug 24, 2012 at 12:01 AMAug 24, 2012 at 11:19 AM

The Toledo school district continued to erroneously label as dropouts those who missed at least four weeks of school a year, even after someone at the state Department of Education told the district its practice conflicted with the intent of the state's rules, according to a new report.

The Toledo school district continued to erroneously label as dropouts those who missed at least four weeks of school a year, even after someone at the state Department of Education told the district its practice conflicted with the intent of the state’s rules, according to a new report.

The practice meant that any student who had missed at least 20 days — five of them consecutive — without an excuse would be automatically withdrawn and re-enrolled using a “dropout” code at the end of the school year. The effect was that those students wouldn’t count in schools’ overall test-passing or attendance rates.

And that made a difference, the report notes: Toledo stopped doing it for one school year when the district’s leadership changed hands, and the district’s academic rating dropped. The state auditor’s office is investigating whether districts across the state, including Columbus, used similar tactics to make their academic ratings look better on the state’s report card.

The Toledo district’s central office has used the process since at least 2002, the new report says. The new superintendent maintains that the practice is allowable, although he suspended it in June when he learned of it.

The preliminary report, written by Toledo lawyer Fritz Byers, who was hired by the Toledo district to review its data-scrubbing policies, says the district broke no laws and did nothing wrong because the Ohio Department of Education did not do more to stop the practice.

Toledo administrators discussed in the fall of 2006 whether their long-standing practice was illegal, according to the report. They checked the legality by making a single telephone call to an unnamed employee of the state Department of Education. That worker told the district that the practice “did not square with the ‘intent’??” of the rules, but the worker would tell the district only to follow the rules in the data-reporting manual.

The department said yesterday that it has no proof that Toledo sought advice on the matter.

The district decided to continue the method because “no one at ODE told a (district) administrator that the practice should be stopped,” the report said.

Toledo Superintendent Jerome Pecko said yesterday that he thinks the report shows that the practice was allowable under state law and data-reporting rules.

“I really do sincerely believe that this does ... pass the litmus test for something that is appropriate for a district to do,” Pecko said. He also said the department employee who had advised Toledo years earlier didn’t explicitly say that the practice was wrong.

The department disagrees with Toledo’s interpretation of the rules.

“We will not accept responsibility for erroneous data submission by the Toledo Public Schools,” spokesman John Charlton said. “We’ve heard from many districts that they fully understand the rules, and they have no trouble following them.”

“If you’re going to withdraw a student (as a dropout), you don’t do it at the end of the school year,” he said.

The report makes it clear that it is examining only district policies; it did not look into what actually had taken place. “I did not look at any data that was reported,” Byers said in an interview yesterday.

In fact, Byers devotes almost an entire page of his report to everything he didn’t look at because the district didn’t ask him to. The list includes actual practices, employees’ roles and responsibilities, and emails among administrators.

Recent emails among administrators show that they analyzed how many students they needed to exclude from their testing rolls to raise their schools’ overall grades. Byers’ report indicates that the district policy was to look solely at attendance, although emails show that the district also aimed to exclude children who didn’t do well on tests.

In one email, which The Dispatch obtained through a public-records request, a principal says that if she could exclude children with only 12 absences instead of 20, it would help.

“If I were able to exclude students who had 12 or more absences I would have 30 (children) total. 15 of those are my low special-education students who scored limited across the board; those would be the ones I’d really like to exclude,” she wrote to Toledo’s assistant superintendent in June. “Limited” is the lowest possible score.

If the district’s practice is wrong, Pecko said, the education department has had ample opportunity to intervene. Former Toledo Superintendent Eugene Sanders left the district in 2006 to head Cleveland schools. Questions were raised in Cleveland schools in 2008, where, under Sanders, the district improved its academic standing. The Plain Dealer in 2008 attributed the gains to the practice of withdrawing and re-enrolling students.

Both Byers and Pecko noted that the Education Department did nothing.

If the state auditor finds that the department condoned or failed to be clear about the appropriateness of the practice, Pecko said he hopes “they’ll step up to the plate and make the adjustments they need to make so we all have good, clear direction on this topic.”